It is a common practice for the author of a document to make the document available on a computer system for review. This permits other users who have access to the computer system (either directly or over a network connection) to make comments on the document. These comments may be included in the document or may be viewable with reference to the original document in some other manner.
Word processors and other computer software are available to permit such comments or annotations to be entered in, or in association with, a given document. Such systems may relate to text documents, structured documents, or other types of computer-readable data stored in files. In general, such systems are file review systems in that the systems permit files of data to be reviewed and comments made in association with the files.
When such comments are inserted in a document, it is important to consistently identify comment authors (or reviewers). The writer of the original document may need to contact a reviewer for additional information, and a reviewer who chooses to use an alias or initials may be difficult to contact. In addition, certain file review systems are customizable to tailor the display or manipulation options for certain documents based on the identity of the reviewer. A file review system may filter comments based on the identity of the reviewer, or the identity of the person who has left the comment. It is therefore important in such systems to ensure that the reviewer is correctly identified and recognized by the system so that the document may be appropriately customized for the reviewer, both in terms of the display and the functionality available for the reviewer.
One approach is to require reviewers to enter their names when starting to review a document. However, reviewers who are forced to enter their names manually may use variants of their names in different comments. This will create difficulties for systems which provide for the process of filtering or searching for comments by a particular reviewer.
Another approach to this problem is to keep track of the reviewers by a machine, network or system identifier such as an IP address. This approach has the benefit of removing the variability of the user or reviewer entering a name or initials. When a new identifier is encountered by the system accepting a comment, the user can be asked to enter a name. Each time a reviewer with this identifier appends a comment, the stored name is assigned to the comment.
Basing reviewer identification on identifiers which are intrinsic to machines or systems presents limitations when reviewers wish to enter comments from different machines or systems, or those machines or systems are changed. These problems may result in comments being attributed to the wrong reviewer, which makes follow-up by the writer of the document being reviewed difficult and sometimes embarrassing.
It is therefore desirable to have a file review system which permits users to identify themselves to the system but to do so in a constrained manner to prevent inconsistent identification or misidentification in the file review system. It is also desirable to have a file review system in which an author or administrator may pre-define levels of access and provide different groups of potential users with different levels of access.